New “hybrid” foreign language classes will be made available over summer interim at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. These classes will combine online education practices with traditional classroom instruction.
The course is being offered for several reasons, according to Dr. Yoshiro Hanai.
He said it’s convenient for students because they can do some of the course work at home around their schedules and still benefit from more traditional classroom instruction.
“Hybrid [courses] is a really good compromise,” Hanai said. “As the instructors, we have some materials that we want to teach face-to-face, but at the same time, if students can work at home for some materials” then students can take the advantages of both personal instruction and online classes.
This summer, the Japanese department is offering a course in kanji writing for the first time. So far three or four students have signed up for the class, Hanai said.
Dr. Hanai speculated that students who had signed up for the kanji program “understand the challenge of learning kanji” and therefore wish take advantage of the hybrid Japanese course that will teach kanji writing.
Professor Richard DCamp, Director of the Foreign Languages Lab, said he is optimistic about the hybrid courses.
He volunteered to teach one of the German hybrid courses over the summer because, as the technology director of the department of foreign languages, he would like to be a part of the current education trend of teaching hybrid courses.
DCamp stressed that the hybrid courses did not compromise a single program.
There are classes in German, Spanish and Japanese, and despite being within the same department, they serve different program needs.
He said the class he’s teaching, German 204, is still the same general education class students would learn in the classroom. The only difference is his class is being taught partially online.
German professor Alan Lareau, said he considered the program “attractive,” as “it gives students alternate access to the class material, while maintaining the face-to-face interaction that is essential to learning a foreign language.”
He added that the program “should work especially well for German 204, because that’s a reading course, so it depends on independent work by the students, working with the texts.”
Hanai said he plans to raise student awareness about the classes soon.
“We haven’t really informed [the student body] seriously about these courses yet.” Hanai said. “[We will] make an announcement … in our first year Japanese courses.”
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